In the industry, in order to develop the product having the competitiveness and early bring it to market, it is desired to effectively utilize the technical resources such as drawings of the existing products. A technique to efficiently retrieve drawings in which necessary components are drawn is required in order to find out necessary information from among a large volume of drawings, which have been accumulated up to now. Then, as a simple method, a text-based search is frequently used, in which a keyword such as a component name assigned to the drawing is input. In addition, recently, in order to realize a search using the shape of the component, which is difficult to represent it by the text, a similar shape search using shape information of the component drawn in the drawing is being used.
On the other hand, a following study is reported. Specifically, when a subject plays janken, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) apparatus measures changes of the blood flow according to the brain activity for each second, and the computer extracts only portion relating to action commands of the brain activity from its image to analyze and interpret which action in the janken is played. The computer sends the result to a robot hand to cause it to perform the same action as the subject plays. However, the study does not mention the search for the contents, which concretely exist.
However, in the conventional similar shape search techniques, the shape information extracted from the drawing is a shape feature quantity predefined by a system developer, and according to a query drawing designated by a searcher, there is a case where any similar result expected by the searcher cannot be obtained. This is because an appropriate shape feature quantity along the intention of the searcher cannot be always obtained by a predetermined extraction method of the shape feature quantity used in the search.
In addition, although it is necessary to prepare a query drawing, there are a lot of cases where there is no appropriate query drawing in hand. In such a case, although it is considered that the searcher draws the component he or she would like to find out by a sketch input or the like, it is often difficult to draw the component the searcher images in mind as he or she wants by the sketch.